Friday, 14 September 2012

Pork Council Must Focus More on Farmers' Needs

Maple Leaf and government policy
is to blame for the continued loss of hog producers and a risk to “thousands of
jobs” at the Brandon slaughter plant.

Manitoba Pork Council general
manager Andrew Dickson would have us believe that the province-wide hog
production ban and new manure treatment regulations are the culprits.

Does Dickson forget that the
loss of most independent hog farmers started when the Maple Leaf, Hy-Tek and
Puratone corporations set up their pyramid scheme-like operations and the
conservative Filmon government removed single-desk marketing protection in the
late 1990s? Well before a moratorium and phosphorus regulation was put in place.Further details here.

The Clean Environment Commission
reports that, in the 1960s, government put the single-desk system in place “in
response to producer complaints that the packing companies were combining to
keep prices down.”

The Canadian Pork Council
acknowledges in its 2011 report “Building a Durable Future in the Canadian Hog
Industry,” that “When consolidated buyers are purchasing from fragmented
sellers, prices will generally favour the buyers,” and, “The lack of ability to
negotiate higher pricing formulae makes it relatively difficult to do business.”

Farmers who raise few hogs,
without the single-desk, are forced to accept the prices set by these companies
with their contract producers for a “$1 to $2 per hog” profit. Or they can stop.
This company set margin hasn’t changed much since 2004. Overall economic
viability is dependent on volume of production and sales. By 2006, 78 per cent
of hogs were raised by only 21 per cent of hog producers with 90 per cent of all
producers under contract production. The consolidation and loss of producers
continues.

Further, a decrease in domestic
pork consumption due to consumer distaste for pollution, health, social, food
safety and animal welfare problems (especially sows kept in crates all their
lives) which are endemic to the industrial system, resulted in more people
directly sourcing pork from the few remaining independent small farmers or not
eating it at all.

If Maple Leaf is so desperate
for hogs to keep its plant running at full capacity, why did the corporation
downsize its sow herd from 109,000 to 40,000 sows in 2008? To transfer more risk
to producers?

MPC members’ interests would be
better served if Dickson focused on the needs of real farmers, the environment
and true humane pig raising, rather than on what its corporate members Maple
Leaf, HyLife and Puratone want.

The current problem is one of
its own making, supported by government.

Manitoba taxpayers should not be
expected to, once again, subsidize the industry with environmental, health and
animal welfare concessions as Dickson is again calling on government to do on
behalf of these MPC corporate members’ interests.